Mission to UAE Supports European Resolution Against Crackdown on Activists

[UAE Crackdown on Activists. Photo from gc4hr.org] [UAE Crackdown on Activists. Photo from gc4hr.org]

Mission to UAE Supports European Resolution Against Crackdown on Activists

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by the Gulf Center for Human Rights on 10 December 2012.]

Mission to UAE Supports European Resolution Against Crackdown on Activists / Free expression rights of sixty-four detainees violated

A crackdown in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has violated the free expression rights of sixty-four detainees, including human rights lawyers, in the Gulf Kingdom, according to a report based on a mission undertaken by the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) in November 2012. The mission confirms the findings of the European Parliament earlier this year, which called for the release of all prisoners of conscience, activists and human rights defenders.

British lawyer Victoria Meads carried out the mission between 30 October to 3 November 2012, on behalf of the GCHR, in cooperation with the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) and Human Rights Watch, both members of IFEX, which provided support for the mission.  It was organised as part of an ongoing campaign started in 2011 by human rights groups to support and protect fundamental freedoms in UAE and in particular, freedoms of expression, opinion and association. That campaign saw the successful release of the "UAE 5," five men detained in violation of their right to free speech.

The mission was carried out following the refutation of the European resolution by the UAE and its allies, including the Italian government. On 26 October 2012, the European Parliament approved a resolution following an investigation by EP members into the state of human rights in the UAE. The Resolution expressed grave concerns over the treatment, repression, and intimidation of human rights defenders, political activists, and civil society actors who peacefully exercise their basic rights to freedom of expression, opinion and assembly, including sixty-four detainees.

The UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Anwar Gargash, said in response, "The biased and prejudiced report levelled unsubstantiated accusations without examining the facts of the situation on the ground."

Meads says, "The conclusions of the European Parliament are clearly accurate in the absence of any evidence to the contrary." She added, "the findings during this mission wholly support those conclusions.  International intervention is urgently required and the Western world should be reviewing human rights commitments in its dealings with the UAE, whilst the UAE continues to sanction such significant breaches of basic human rights."

The goals of the recent mission were to investigate human rights violations, including the ongoing crackdown on human rights defenders and activists which has led so far to around sixty-four arrests and enforced disappearances. The mission also met human rights defenders and some members of the families of detained activists, as well as making an official request to visit prominent human rights lawyers Dr. Mohammed Al-Roken and Dr. Mohammed Al-Mansori in prison, which was rejected by the office of the Office of the Attorney General in UAE.

The GCHR and its campaign partners respectfully call on the authorities in the UAE to:

1. Immediately and unconditionally release all sixty-four human rights defenders and activists who are being held as a direct result of their legitimate human rights work;

2. Immediately disclose the whereabouts of all human rights defenders that are being detained; grant the sixty-four human rights defenders and activists in detention immediate and unfettered access to legal representation, as well as their families;

3. Guarantee the physical and psychological integrity and security of the sixty-four human rights defender and activists who remain in detention;

4. Guarantee in all circumstances that all human rights defenders in UAE are able to carry out their legitimate human rights activities without fear of reprisals and free of all restrictions including judicial harassment;

5. Guarantee the rights of freedom of expression, assembly, and association for all citizens and residents of the UAE.

The full report is available in English (and Arabic to be posted shortly) HERE.

For more information, please contact:

 1. Victoria Meads, British lawyer: victoria.meads@tooks.co.uk

 2. Khalid Ibrahim, Gulf Centre for Human Rights: Khalid@gc4hr.org, mobile: +961 70159552

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412